Lecture-perfomance: New Artistic Formats, Places, Practices and Behaviours is a research project comprising an exhibition, a season of performance-lectures, a webpage and a programme of fringe activities which explore an increasingly popular practice within the art world although still largely unknown in Spain: the use artists make of the lecture format as a work of art.
Artists use the ‘dramatised conference’ to examine key issues in the contemporary cultural agenda, concerns of interest in art and in our current society (information, generation of knowledge, platforms and formats for distribution and

Undermining assumptions about what constitutes an exhibition—its institutional context, discursive network, audience, or even the artwork shown—the work of Fia Backström (Stockholm, Sweden, 1980) explores the parameters of format and the logic of display. Her work refuses fixity of images or categories; virtually impossible to characterize, Backström’s practice encompasses producing printed matter and merchandise-based items, arrangements and displays, creating objects, writing texts, and initiating gatherings and events. HERD INSTINCT 360 degrees (2006), a staged situation with sacred undertones, including lectures, performances and communal intake, where the other side of human

Erik Bünger (Växjö, Sweden, 1976) is drawn to processes of transformative incorporation, the actions of sonorous reception and emission that we constantly effect, and whose effect we are. In one of his more recent works such as A Lecture on Schizophonia, the Swedish artist based in Berlin has reinvented a genre that flourished in the eighteenth-century theatre: the lecture-performance. One of the most successful of these was George Stevens’s lecture On Heads, which used a series of busts of historical figures to develop some meditations upon the idea of character.

“El veneno del baile” is one of the long-term research and production projects carried out by the Asturian-born artist Paco Cao (Tudela Veguín, Spain, 1965). The project was commissioned by the CGAC as part of Proxecto-Edición (2006-2008), for the production of a 71-minute film whose plot is the starting point for the story which sustains the exhibition presented in 2011 at the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre (Brazil), intertwining fiction and historical reality. The installation he presents at the MUSAC under the title Venenum Saltationis is arranged in two

Carolina Caycedo (London, UK, 1978) responds to the effects of global capitalism with a practice rooted in processes of communication, movement and exchange. Her varied projects, cutting across street actions, flea markets and public protests, are invariably sourced in communities from outside the art world and her works always allude to culture and street economy. In her work, Carolina Caycedo constantly questions the idea of borders: the borders between producers and consumers, between professionals and amateurs, between profit and disadvantage, between art and society. For her exhibition at the MUSAC,

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961; Trondheim, Norway, 1961) made a name for themselves in the mid 1990s as a two-man collaborative through their actions and installations which very soon stood out by virtue of their strong social and political orientation. A good example of that are their celebrated Powerless Structures, a suite of works developed throughout time and in which the artists explore the notion of space in all its manifold possibilities of meaning and function. In this series, the reversion of terms in the purest Foucauldian

The performative practice of Italian artist Chiara Fumai (Rome, Italy, 1978) belongs to the tradition of female psychics, who are ‘spoken by’ different controversial entities, which the artist freely (mis)interprets and combines into new stories, questioning their symbolic meaning and representation in the mind of the viewer. Dealing with radical feminism, media culture, language and repression, her starting point is performance, later transformed into installations, videos, collages and performative displays. In the framework of this project at MUSAC the artist will present two performances. Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas is

Alistair Gentry (Bedford, UK, 1973) is a writer and artist. Recent works involve oratory, storytelling, and extensively researched factual content derived earnestly or satirically from scientific forms and research methods. He has been artist-in-residence for the Genomics Policy & Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh and for New Media Scotland, and was awarded an Artist Fellowship by Arts Council England and English Heritage (the national agency for historic buildings and archaeological sites). He is the author of two novels, numerous short stories, critical articles on artists, contemporary art and

Terence Gower (British Columbia, Canada, 1965) works on a number of bodies of work at once, each developed over several years. In the past decade the artist’s work has focused on a critical re-reading of the modern movement and its utopian bent. A desire to re-examine the notion of progress—a term corrupted by the excesses of technological modernism—has fuelled his research on the post-war period and has led to a search for models from the past that might still be relevant today. He has done extensive work about modern architecture

This piece titled ABC de la performance by Jaime Vallaure (Oviedo, Spain, 1965), Rafael Lamata (Valencia, Spain, 1959) and Daniela Musicco characterized as a stewardess, is a pivotal work in the history of video performance in Spain. With a heightened sense of humour and breeziness, this piece offers us an exploration of performance, its codes and languages. The authors use a simple and readily recognisable structure: a tour of the alphabet in order to, with each letter, peruse ways of doing, resources, possibilities and doubts having to do with the

The practice of Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, Spain, 1978) has its groundbases in performance, the inscription of her biography in a number of social codifications and, first and foremost, the constituent power of the voice and the word. She temporarily inhabits, or uses, certain conventions to address identity and the processes by which said identity is conformed, shared, changed, fictionalised and determined by normative institutions or contexts. The artist uses texts, the written or spoken word, language and silence to build situations and narratives. Performances, sound pieces, journals, videos, installations,

From his poetic stance and using the voice as a connecting thread, Peñafiel’s work as a whole draws a path through history, recovering the —both documented and sensed— presence of key figures who chose critical thought as a way of fighting and resistance. In research projects and long-term works —already presented at Galería Joan Prats, in Barcelona— including Distancia, miento on the figure of Ruth Berlau (Bertolt Brecht’s sentimental and working partner), or Locución Merkel-Bachelet, a fictional encounter between Michelle Bachelet and Angela Merkel in a tram in the German

Francisco Ruiz de Infante (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 1966) belongs to a generation of artists whose sensibility and concerns are coloured by the encounter and confrontation between technology and other materials. Nearly always ephemeral, his proposals are usually the outcome of on-site experience. The experimental situations Ruiz de Infante proposes and the unbalance they provoke are often a “trap” of sorts created to trigger in spectators a questioning of their own perceptual reality. Ruiz de Infante engages in a reconstruction of some of the ways memory operates when activated from the present:

“Untitled, 1999 (caravan)” is a specific installation simulating a caravan and including, on the one hand, a zone for reading, watching videos or listening to music and, on the other hand, a kitchen. It is an architectural space for public use housed within another (the exhibition gallery), in which the artist organises cooking and social interaction get-togethers. Tiravanija provides the basic material (the space) and the stimuli (the event), breaking down the visual barrier and urging the spectator to become a participant in it, while in the process leaving his

All cultural tradition needs critiques, parodies, revisions and footnotes and moreover, obviously, a continuous stream of references inherent to a field or environment. Contemporary art is a very fertile field in this aspect; as such commentaries make up the foundations of countless different projects, which among others, include those of the collaborative entity called Black Tulip that was created in Barcelona in 2009 as an umbrella that temporarily hosts one artist or a group of them as anonymous collaborators. This group of artists generally revises the tradition that their works

For more than forty years, the practice of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina (Murcia, Spain, 1937) has been predicated on conceptual rigour and consistency. His proposals are known from their committed stance, removed from mainstream aspects of the art system. One of his statements provides us a glimpse of his understanding of art: “Art is a personal action which may be used as an example, but will never have an exemplary value.” Thus, for the artist, art only makes sense when it makes us aware of and responsible for a personal reality,

The practice of the Portuguese artist Ricardo Valentim (Loulé, Portugal, 1978) is underpinned by the creation of strategies aimed at redefining forms of cultural constructs and established hegemonic orders. Using conventional models of cultural constructs as a starting point, the artist endeavours to recreate spaces where the content dealt with is presented upside-down or in a counter-hegemonic fashion.
In films like O Outro Lado do Uso and Floating Island, Valentim explores acritically established cultural notions: in the former, the daily activities of individuals when leaving a Starbucks café with their

Tris Vonna-Michell (Rochford, UK, 1982) performs narratives and constructs installations through the layering of these narratives, photographs and mementos, presented using antiquated technologies and slide projection. He will present a new work titled ‘Capitol Complex’ which revolves around a manuscript, consisting of four acts based on four characters, which serves as an underlining blueprint for the work. The soundtrack is based on a live performance recording, and is accompanied by a slide sequence projected on a Telex machine. The slide sequence is a visual abstraction of all four acts, while